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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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On September 12, 1946, Minnie Bruce Pratt was born September in Selma, Alabama, and grew up in Centreville. She attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her books of poetry include The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999), which was named book of the year by ForeWord magazine in the Gay/Lesbian category and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; Crime Against Nature (1990), which was chosen as the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Poetry Selection, received the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature; We Say We Love Each Other (1985); and a chapbook, The Sound of One Fork (1981).

For five years she was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions. Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism (1988), which has been adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses. In 1991 Pratt was chosen, along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, to receive a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award given by the Fund for Free Expression. In 1992 her book of autobiographical and political essays, Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 (1991), was a finalist in nonfiction for the Lambda Literary Awards. Her book of prose stories about gender boundary crossing, S/HE (1995), was one of five finalists in nonfiction for the 1995 American Library Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award, as well as one of three finalists for the Firecracker Award in nonfiction. Pratt has also been granted a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In spring 2000 she was a Community Writer-in-Residence for the YMCA National Writer's Voice Program, and from 2002-2003 she was the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women's Studies at Hamilton College. Pratt lives with writer and activist Leslie Feinberg in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Breakfast

Minnie Bruce Pratt, 1946

Rush hour, and the short order cook lobs breakfast
sandwiches, silverfoil softballs, up and down the line.
We stand until someone says, Yes? The next person behind
breathes hungrily. The cashier's hands never stop. He shouts:
Where's my double double? We help. We eliminate all verbs.
The superfluous want, need, give they already know. Nothing's left
but stay or go, and a few things like bread. No one can stay long,
not even the stolid man in blue-hooded sweats, head down, eating,
his work boots powdered with cement dust like snow that never melts.

by this poet

Through binoculars the spiral nebula was
a smudged white thumbprint on the night sky.
Stories said it was a mark left by the hand
of Night, that old she, easily weaving
the universe out of milky strings of chaos.
Beatrice found creation more difficult.
Tonight what she had was greasy water
whirling in the

He was her guide. He lived in hell. Every day he thought
he was dead. Years after he's died, she thinks it's him stumbling
drunk through the subway turnstile. Just the two of them
on the platform. He asks her for money, pennies for passage:
In the nursing home, a palsied woman guards the door

It's at dinnertime the stories come, abruptly,
as they sit down to food predictable as ritual.
Pink lady peas, tomatoes red as fat hearts
sliced thin on a plate, cornbread hot, yellow
clay made edible. The aunts hand the dishes
and tell of people who've shadowed them, pesky
terrors, ageing reflections that peer